On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 07:29:12PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I hope we aren't thinking about keeping things difficult for > everybody simply because everybody includes some people who > may want to take advantage of GCC in a proprietary way. In > the long term, this only benefits the folks you'd be trying > to exclude.
RMS believes that people who extend GCC, hoping to take their extensions proprietary, and then finding that they can't, will then just decide to contribute the code, if it is useful, since otherwise they can't distribute and have to support it by themselves forever, or else they have to risk legal problems. And he has some evidence that this sometimes happens (C++, Objective-C, many contributed back ends). So the intent isn't to prevent certain people from using it, but to have those people contribute the changes back even if that isn't their preference. Now that's fine as far as it goes, but when it becomes a defense of an opaque, non-extendable architecture we have a problem.
